The papers in the four preceding sections represent detailed analyses of particular problems relevant to the ethnography of speaking. Although the papers are closely focused and deal with specific societies, they also raise general methodological and theoretical questions, with wider implications. By contrast, the papers in this final section address themselves primarily to broader issues of method and theory.

The first paper, by Allen Grimshaw, discusses a range of relationships between method and theory in the ethnography of speaking, with particular reference to some of the papers in this volume. Consistent with contemporary linguistics, sociology, and anthropology, Grimshaw stresses the importance of accounting for native intuitions in an ethnography of speaking. But he also warns that the notion of native intuitions cannot be used uncritically; in fact the ethnography of speaking, by its insistence on the interrelation of language and social life, provides new ways of investigating intuitions which avoid the circularity of arbitrarily dealing with linguistic, social, or cultural intuitions as separate systems. Grimshaw also notes the necessary progression from descriptions of particular aspects of speaking to coherent ethnographies of speaking to theory.

During the past decade and even at times in this volume, ‘the ethnography of speaking’ and ‘the ethnography of communication’ have been used almost interchangeably. One of the contributions of this field has been the understanding that various communicative modes (verbal, proxemic, kinesic) are not absolutely independent of one another but are rather interrelated in various ways in various societies.